


Birdsong on Jupiter

by unreadlibrary



Category: Cowboy Bebop
Genre: Canon-typical language, Complete, F/M, One-Shot, Post-Series, Spike's Alive Because Plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-06
Updated: 2018-07-06
Packaged: 2019-06-06 02:31:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15184796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unreadlibrary/pseuds/unreadlibrary
Summary: Or, a story about some gypsies.





	Birdsong on Jupiter

She left him messages in the past tense: “Faye called you.”

Walking around the _Bebop_ like the ghost he supposed he was, he’d replay the messages at random, in between the left messages for failed deliveries, late bills, angry bounties, and the occasional condolence left by an old, old friend. For the most part, the news of Spike Spiegel’s death hadn’t really spread. So the old, old friends were the true ones—and there was a wry sense of “you can't pull the wool over _my eyes_ ” in the back of their voices.

Except for Faye's.

Spike figured the old, old friends had already made peace with never seeing Spike again, whether Spike lived to be one-hundred-and-one or disappeared into the rain while he was still handsome as sin. And that’s how Spike would like to be remembered. Shoulders wide as a coat rack, unkempt hair, a living legend even in death.

He turned to music after a while. He had started to play Faye’s clips on repeat.

 _Well, I had a woman, who was long and tall_  
_She moved her body like a cannon ball_  
_Fare thee well, my honey, fare thee well_

Who had sung it best? Spike figured that guy Dave Von Ronk, but only because his singing voice reminded him of Jet’s. Speaking of, he was scheduled to catch drinks with him in two months time—back when they both hit up on Jupiter. Of course, Jet didn’t expect Spike to keep that appointment. Jet was only partly surprised when Spike showed up two months early. When he asked Spike why (he had rather expected Spike would show up late, if at all), Spike shrugged his shoulders. He just couldn’t get that song out of his head.

“How’s the Bebop holding up?” Jet asked, wiping down an already-clean glass. Spike thought Jet looked the right size standing behind the bar that was his namesake.

“It’s trashed! What the hell were you guys doing while I was gone?”

“Not mourning your loss, that’s for sure,” The bar was empty save for leftover smoke, so Jet circled around and sat next to Spike. He was looking at Spike in a way Spike didn’t like. Like this was about to get serious.

“Why don’t you call her up?” Jet asked him. This was his first time bringing Faye up. She hadn’t stuck around by the time Spike got back to the _Bebop_ and found Jet camping out on his lonesome.

“She was just some chick we knew for a few months,” said Spike.

“Lightening doesn’t often strike twice, my friend,” Jet said. Spike swallowed the rum he’d been swishing but it went down like fire.

*

When he got back to the _Bebop_ he couldn’t stand to listen to that song another time. This time Jet left him a message but Spike deleted it. He had to nurse his black eye for two weeks before his eye socket returned to a respectable color. He really shouldn’t have said what he said after coughing down that rum. In fact, he realized he was sorry. But he’d already deleted the message, and Spike figured he’d still keep that appointment in two months’ time.

 _At home in the darkness, but hungry for dawn_  
_I only remember scenes, never the stories I live_  
_The good thing about that is, it's easy to forgive_  
_Can't make assumptions about any of this_  
_We're nomads following our own songlines_

He’s not sure when his songs got sad, but he finds them soothing. Seems to fit the empty shell of the **Bebop.** It does make him replay those messages from time to time. It’s nice to hear a woman’s voice. Sometimes he just plays chick flicks in the back for that same reason. He’s sleeping with his gun beneath his pillow like he used to.

He knows they know he’s dead. They think he’s dead. What if they stop thinking he’s dead?

So, yes, the women and the songs are soothing. Even if the song-of-the-week is written by a guy who died a hundred years ago and somehow ended up with a name like Bruce Cockburn. Other times it’s the George Lewis Ragtime Band, or Willie Nelson, or Ella Fitzgerald, or Stevie Nicks.

In fact, he gets on a Fleetwood Mac kick for the next seven weeks.

 _So I'm back to the velvet underground_  
_Back to the floor that I love_  
_To a room with some lace and paper flowers_  
_Back to the gypsy that I was_

*

It’s raining on Jupiter and Spike savors his last cigarette outside _Jet Black_. That’s it. Jet Black is the bar and the bar is Jet Black. Spike had smiled the first time he saw it. Now he frowned, deeply. And he’s not surprised when a tall, hugely-muscled figure comes around the corner, wet from taking out trash in the rain, and clamps Spike on the shoulder. Spike is not surprised, just annoyed.

“Spike!” Jet grins like an idiot, “It’s raining—come on the hell in!”

“I’m sorry for last time,” Spike said, taking two quick drags, “And I won’t repeat myself on that,”

“Are you coming in or not?”

Spike brooded a moment longer, popping up his wet collar for a more grandiose effect. “This,” he muttered, “Is a set-up,”

“Come on, I managed to snag a case of old-world beer. I saved you a spot at the bar—”

“This is a set-up, Jet,”

Jet shrugs, “She’s always here on Thursday nights,”

With that, Spike ran out of cigarette.

She’s not sitting at the bar, but a table up against the dark wall littered with pictures from several decades. She’s staring at the pictures. Red dress. Longer hair.

Spike sits at the bar, between two strangers who seem to know Jet well enough. One old and drooling into his beard, and one baby-faced and barely of age. Not that that sort of thing mattered out in this part of Jupiter.

The whole room is crowded with strangers. Spike thinks back over the glimpse of Faye Valentine, alone at a table that could easily sit six.

Jet pops open two beers and clinks Spike’s bottle for him. Then the cheeky bastard opens up a third and walks up to Faye’s table. Sits down. Starts talking.

Spike finishes his beer at the bar, listening to the happy drunk confessions of Pops and Babyface. Then he gets up and walks out the door.

*

He can’t stop listening to the same songs over and over again, but he deletes all of Faye’s message save one. He thinks it’s the last one, but they all start the same.

“Faye called you. Faye called you twenty-one times. And Faye got herself a glamorous, high-paying job and guess what? I still end up back here. It had been going so well! Beautiful, fat old bird named _Seven Storey Mountain._ How cheeky is that! Some luxury cruise liner that got its name from some Trappist monk’s book! I bet the bastards didn’t even know. But there I was—entertainer, card dealer, body guard. You name it, that was me. Then the whole thing goes ka- _blooey_. I like to think it’s your fault. But—”

And here the recording was interrupted by pitiful birdsong, or what was supposed to be birdsong. It was the weak sort of cheep-cheep-chirp. Faye was making soothing, clucking sounds.

“—but I found somebody who’s even deeper in the craphole than I am. So _Seven Storey Mountain_ goes ka-blooey, right? I’m decked out in my cheap Chinese dress and two hours of careful makeup, and all of its covered in soot. And we’re in zero-g. Great! And then I think, screw it, I’m getting paid! So I know where the good stuff is and I head straight for the cargo bay. Woolongs, woolongs, mine, mine, mine. And a nice change of clothes, and heels made of diamonds, and—and this damn bird!”

Faye was making clucking sounds again.

 _“There, there._ So anyway I make off with all this stuff and make my getaway and blah blah blah. And then I go to sell this stupid, overly-rare, pampered little dweeb, right? Only they won’t take it. And why? Why? Because it’s son-of-a-bitch owner kept the thing in zero gravity its entire life! _It never learned to fly!”_

Then there’s just birdsong. Almost proper birdsong. For almost a whole minute. Spike had listened to this recording only half as much as the others, since it was so much longer, but he listened to it several more times as the weeks got lonely and woman-less and Spike got bored of his old centerfolds and just needed to be reminded of anything vaguely feminine in the long cold celibacy of space.

And each time he thought he heard, perhaps in the middle of that strange minute, something like a stifled cry.

*

  
He hadn’t made another appointment with Jet and he didn’t plan to, but he still somehow knows its nine weeks to the day when he receives a left message from Faye Valentine. After avoiding this fact for hours, he only works up the courage to listen to it with something cold and unfeeling in his hands. He takes his gun out from under the pillow and spreads his elbows on his knees and tells the Bebop to play the new messages. Another failed delivery. Another bill collector. A slightly angry bounty. And her. The faint birdsong sends something like lightening up his spine.

“Faye called you.”

There’s a proper beat before she continues, and Spike grins unkindly at his gun.

“You know, I’ve actually made some friends. I don’t know if I’ve found my people yet, but I think that’s because—. God, like you care. I’ll just tell you anyway. I think it’s because I’m only now just trying to act like a human being. You know? Like somebody else’s happiness might mean something to me. Because I sure as—. Ugh, I don’t even have the energy to curse. You know what Jet says? I’m drying up my sin. I certainly feel like I’m drying up. Like I’m…. Look, I’ve got friends. I don’t need you. But dammit Spike, I want you. And if you want to be a human being for one night instead of living up there like a ghost, come down on Thursday night. I can’t say that offer will last too long. Not too long at all. You know, the other day I looked up an old convent friend of mine. I actually think me and God would get along just fine. So, before I become Sister Valentine, why don’t you say hello to me proper, huh? I don’t like you near as much as a ghost.”

The gun is burning in Spike’s hand by the end. His whole body is burning. He takes a cold shower. Sleeps without the gun.

*

  
He chooses a Thursday that has personal significance to him. She would never know. To her it’s just an ordinary Thursday and she looks up from her table and barely masks her surprise.

“Your place or mine?” Spike asks her.

Her place is a museum of far-flung things. Spike knew it wouldn’t be gaudy. Everything was loud but of surprisingly good taste. As they walked in silence, closer to her bedroom, the objects and the colors and the plants and the gauze pinned to the walls and the ceiling like canopies of tangible white light felt more and more like the Faye that kept herself hidden away. It was this part of her that had always intrigued him.

Her hair is long and he finds himself braiding it before untangling the straps of her dress. A black bra. He was so grateful for the sight of a black bra; for the promise of the pale breasts underneath. He bites her earrings off gently, places them on the nightstand. It’s muggy out and the window is open, with birdsong in the background, somewhere outside, somewhere in some hidden corner of the room. She cards her fingers in his hair and she sighs. “I’ve always wanted to do that.”

_Fare thee well, oh honey, fare thee well_

*

  
She left him one last message. A last request.

He thinks sometimes if he hadn’t slept with her that night, things would be different. He can’t say, truthfully, that he has any regrets. But he wonders. Especially on nights when the _Bebop_ feels so empty and the thoughts of companionship leave him raw in the stomach and without lightening in the spine.

She told him in her last message that she took up an offer at the Abbey of Alma de La Tierra. But he couldn’t laugh at the picture of her as a nun. Isn’t that what she had wanted all along? People to belong to, and something big, at least bigger than herself? Heck, that was pretty much the reason he still hung around the _Bebop._ Why he bothered keeping appointments with Jet.

But Faye had a last request. It was delivered to Spike on an insignificant Thursday, and, he had to admit, though it made it hard to listen to the radio, the place certainly felt a bit more alive.

“I can’t keep her. I wish I could, but I can’t,” her message said, “But you wanna know what I named her?”

Spike is listening to the message again, wrestling the bird’s cage into his bedroom, and swearing underneath his breath.

“I couldn’t think of her name, not for months and months. She was just Bird. Then you came, and you stayed, at least a little while. And then you left. And then I knew I should leave. And then—I knew her name.”

Spike smiled. His grin was getting a little less hard, he had to admit. He hadn’t slept with a gun under his pillow for a spell. He was either staring to relax or starting to get soft. He rewound the message. He’d missed his favorite part.

“—then—I knew her name: Gypsy. Spike, I’m going to miss Gypsy. It’ll be like missing you.”

Another appropriate beat.

“Well! Don’t forget, then.”

Gypsy started to sing at that. Spike figured he’d teach her all the good songs. Dave von Ronk. Stevie Nicks. Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, The George Lewis Ragtime Band. And Bruce freakin’ Cockburn.

But first he pressed the record button and let Gypsy sing her heart out. He’d send it to one Sister Valentine at the Abbey of Alma de La Tierra; maybe when another significant Thursday rolled around and Spike was feeling generous.

He thought of her fingers carding through his hair, and all the things they talked about before and after.

Maybe he could just feel generous right now.

“Spike called.” And he clicked off the receiver.

**Author's Note:**

> It's an interesting challenge, writing about people who have absolutely different life styles and value choices than you yourself are in the realm of living and making. I hope I did justice to the characters; I hope this piece is mature in what it tries to handle. I'd like to try a proper romance between these two one of these days; but here's an example of a bittersweet but admittedly happy failure. 
> 
> P.S. I haven't watched Cowboy Bebop in years and cannot remember what Jet did after the series or if they even showed Jupiter and if so what it was like. Ta-da!
> 
> Songs Referenced (In Order):  
> Dink's Song - Traditional American Folksong (I like Dave von Ronk's verison the best)  
> Birmingham Shadows - Bruce freakin' Cockburn  
> Gypsy - Fleetwood Mac


End file.
